Cassies Cosmic Campout

Newsday Staff Writer

Cassie, her parents, and Orion the dog are camping far from the city lights.

Cassie loves a dark sky. Lying on her sleeping bag, she sees thousands of twinkling stars floating silently in the blackness. A white band of milky light splashes across the sky. It is the glow of our own Milky Way galaxy.

"I feel like I'm floating in space all alone," says Cassie. "Dad, do you think there are any other planets like Earth?"

"I do, Cassie," Dad replies. "The universe is immense. We can't even count all the stars we see. Even so, our eyes are very poor."

"Not mine! I see 20-20!" Cassie boasts.

"Ha!" Mom laughs. "Even perfect eyes see only a tiny slice of the starlight. It's as if there's a whole rainbow of colors, but sadly we can see only one shade of green."

"What if we could see all the starlight colors?" asks Cassie.

"Well, we can--with special telescopes," Dad replies.

"Right," agrees Mom. "You wonder about other planets like Earth. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is one that can see new solar systems forming and . . . "

"Oh, yes!" Dad interrupts. "This telescope sees not only bright stars, but also much cooler stuff that doesn't shine in visible light. It has found disks of cool dust and debris around many stars. New planets form inside these dusty disks. Our own planet formed from a dusty disk surrounding our own Sun."

"Hmm. How can this telescope see cool dust?" Cassie asks.

"It sees infrared light," replies Mom. "Nearly everything glows in infrared light. Even you! Infrared is not visible to us, but we can feel it. As heat!"

"Other telescopes see other invisible kinds of light too," Dad adds. "When we put all their pictures together, we see the universe in all its beautiful colors."

Cassie gazes up and thinks, "I'm so lucky to be here, safe on friendly planet Earth, seeing even just a tiny slice of all this beauty."

Orion breathes a doggie sigh of agreement.

Read "Lucy's Planet Hunt: Or, how to see things in a different light." Go to spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spitzer/lucy.

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This article was written by Diane K. Fisher and illustrated by Alexander Novati. It was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.